


The Park

by justthismorning



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-28
Updated: 2016-04-28
Packaged: 2018-06-05 03:56:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6688249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justthismorning/pseuds/justthismorning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam and Dean haven't been hunting for a very long time. Now they just spend their days wandering the park.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Park

**Author's Note:**

> Wincest if you squint (in other words, Wincest if you wanna make it that way); death fic; extreme post series

There were regulars at the park. Regular animals like the squirrel with no tail that lived under the tool shed, and the raccoon that holed up in the old sewer outflow pipe. There were regular people, too. The man with the two long-haired Chihuahuas that he let off the leash every now and then, the crazy woman who had been released from the mental health facility too early and ended up tattooing her whole face. There was the guy who carried around dog treats, and the couple who always walked about ten feet apart from each other. Then there were the two old men who just sat on the park bench all day, or wandered up and down the path.

The taller man had shaggy white hair that curled around his ears. He had a smile that could bring back the sun during a rain storm. The shorter man – though he wasn’t short compared to the rest of the population –had crinkling eyes that told of smiles long forgotten but not lost. He had a sharp wit and reflexes that seemed dulled by age but in his day must have been startling.

It was almost sad to see them shuffling from park bench to bench. It was heart breaking to see the shorter man stop mid-stride, as though he’d forgotten where he was. It was gut wrenching to see the taller man place a huge hand on his back and guide him on, gentle touches almost sparking recognition.

*

“Hey doll,” the shorter man once said, smiling at the woman that leaned over the garden, pulling the weeds. “I’m Dean.”

She smiled, wiped her hands on her pants and stood. He winked playfully, but not threateningly. “Can you tell me how to get to the nearest burger joint?”

His eyes were green. So green that they matched the lush grass the unseasonal amounts of rain had coaxed from the earth. That green was misted over with age but the smile sparkled right from his soul. She didn’t have a chance to answer him though, because the taller man came jogging toward them, jogging despite the aging bones.

His face was a picture of pure panic as he reached his hands out for Dean and pulled him to him.

“Sammy,” Dean purred, letting his head rest on the once-broad chest in front of him. “My Sammy. Little Sam. Sammy.” The woman smiled as the taller man – Sam – surreptitiously checked for any type of damage. She almost missed the change. She only noticed it when Sam’s face went from relieved to so sad she almost wanted to cry for him.

“We’ll find Dad, Sammy, don’t worry.”

It didn’t mean anything. But Sam’s face broke and he brushed the thinning hair from Dean’s face.  
“Yeah, man,” he whispered. “We’ll find him.”

*

Dean and Sam were favourites at the park. The gentleness of Sam’s speech, the delighted grin the Dean gave to everyone who talked to him, and the constant presence. The slight resemblance – chin, walk, eyes – spoke of familiar relations. Probably brothers, was the guess. One of the girls who worked there commented once how sweet it was that they were there together every day.

Even in the rain, they were there. Dean was tucked in a leather jacket that had seen better days, probably decades, and they were huddled under a black umbrella. Dean was pushing his foot into a mud slick by the path: push, slide forward, extract with a wet sucking sound, repeat. Sam watched patiently until he tired of it and decided to walk toward the empty playground.

“Remember the Striga? Sam, remember?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“I kicked its ass. No more Striga. Children are safe. You’re safe.”

And Sam nodded.

*

Dean liked the tailless squirrel. Sometimes he would follow it curiously. When the ground was dry and the sun was shining, he would follow it until it ran up a tree, then he would sit down and guard it so no other squirrels tried to chase it away. Sam always just trailed him, a few steps behind. Always watching, but never stopping him.

“My brother Sammy had a squirrel once,” he told Sam. The young worker nearby stopped scraping up the broken glass and watched. “It was so little,” he continued, showing his hand to Sam. “Fit in the palm of his hand. Only little.” He drew a small circle on his palm to demonstrate and looked up at Sam. His smile faded. “It died. Sammy cried for a week. Nothing I could do.”

Sam only nodded and made sympathetic noises in his throat.

When Dean turned to look up the tree to where the squirrel was waiting warily for him to leave, Sam scrubbed the back of his hand over his eyes, and the young worker felt like he was intruding on something too intimate.

*

In May Sam wore a new pair of shoes. They were brown Pumas, out of style by about fifty years, but some vintage shops still sold them. They clashed horribly with the rest of Sam’s outfit but the young workers admitted over lunch that he was probably the type to have worn them once. They spent a half hour talking about what Sam might have been like when he was their age. They laughed at the possible hair styles, and the goofy things he probably wore.

Then Dean came wandering in from one of his explorations. Sitting down cheerfully beside the youngest worker, he smiled.

“It’s my brother’s birthday,” he told them. “See his shoes? I got him shoes just like the one he lost.” Sam stood watching from the shade of a nearby tree. His left hand was stuffed in his pocket, his right clutched the cane he sometimes used when the weather got too humid. “Stupid Bela stole the rabbit foot. Bitch.”

And no one knew what to say, or who Bela was, but then Sam came forward and soothingly told Dean that they would catch up to Bela and make her give it back.

“But we got it back, Sammy,” Dean told him wide-eyed. “We burned it. She shot you and we burned it.”

Sam nodded and murmured something about lottery tickets, to which Dean laughed and called him Jinx.

*

The city held an autofest at the park that year. Cars of all ages were lined up everywhere in the park, and speakers pumped out music from the 1940s right through to the 1970s. Sam bought two passes for the whole weekend. They were there before it even opened and if the cops patrolling the entrance gave them a hard time, the park foreman came and let them through anyway.

It was worth it, he deemed, later as he watched Dean’s face light up when he ambled around the old muscle cars. When Dean stood beside a teal Maverick and starting talking to the young owner, it was obvious Dean knew what was what. He asked about the CDI Thriftpower versus the V8, and he peeked at the engine reverently.

When he was done he marched up to a pink Impala and cringed.

“What’d we do with mine, Sammy?” he asked, turning to meet Sam’s eyes from where his brother stood watching. “I can’t remember. Did we sell her?”

Sam stepped forward and put his arm around his brother. “We sold her. Someone Bobby knew,” but the lie was there, simmering in his face and in the way he wouldn’t look at Dean until he’d moved off and was examining a Red GTO.

*

The police arrested a man once. It was a Friday night and the guy had been seen causing trouble and harassing people throughout the park, but no one had been able to nab him till then. He made the mistake of calling Dean a flaming faggot. “Don’t think you won’t burn in hell, old-timer,” he’d snapped at Dean, who had just told Sam he loved him for buying him another batch of greasy fries when the seagulls knocked his first out of his hand.

Dean took one look at the guy and started talking at him in a low rumble that might have been frightening coming from a younger man. He held his ground when the offender advanced on him. Sam intervened when the guy raised his arm in what appeared to be an attempt to backhand Dean.

Sam intervened and in less than two seconds, the man was flat on his face with both his hands pinned behind his back. No one really saw what happened, or how it happened. It shocked everyone that a man in his eighties could take down a guy security had been having trouble with for months.

But when he was taken away in the cruiser, Dean just turned to Sam and exclaimed jubilantly, “You’re batman.”

Sam grinned and lightly smacked the back of Dean’s head, which mad Dean return the favour with a punch in the arm.

*

In September, Sam and Dean stopped coming to the park. One day, then two days and they didn’t come back. Almost a week passed. The lady with the tattoos continued to wander, occasionally brightly telling someone about the next one she’s getting. The Chihuahuas yapped and chased the birds. And Sam and Dean didn’t come around. The foreman on duty watched Dean’s squirrel as it went about its day, fattening up for winter. He watched as it looked around a few times, as if even the animals noticed the absence.

It was a Monday afternoon that Sam returned. Alone. He was sitting on the bench overlooking the fountain. The spray was turned off and the workers would be coming soon to put a box over the marble statue in the centre.

But Sam wasn’t looking at the fountain. He had his head bowed, his eyes closed. His fingers on his right hand clenched and unclenched against the softened denim of his jeans. The fingers of his left clutched the amulet Dean always wore around his neck. He sat like that all day and when he left at sundown everyone watched him go.

He came back the next day, and the next. Occasionally he would sit and stare at nothing. Sometimes he would just walk back and forth until his arthritis pained him too much and he went home. Once he wandered around, seemingly aimlessly, until he found Dean’s squirrel, and then he watched it for the rest of the day.

*

In early October Sam was sitting by the playground. A little girl played silently as her mother watched on. The bars of the climber were cold and the ground was hard, but her grins were happy. A young man in dated clothes – a leather jacket with the collar flipped up, biker boots and faded jeans – wandered in from the parking lot, sat beside Sam. He glanced over once but said nothing.

The foreman, who was there until the park closed in November, watched from where he was removing several of the larger dead branches from the trees. The young man raised his hand and rubbed the back of his neck, where the short cropped hair left it exposed above the collar. When he lowered his hand again, he didn’t drop it back into his lap. He let it fall to the bench, between him and Sam, and when Sam reached over and covered his fingers with his own huge hand, his smile was almost blinding despite the tears that tracked down his old and wrinkled face.

Sam never came back to the park. An obituary in the newspaper told of a Samuel Winchester who died of natural causes. Brother Dean passed away only a month previous. No relatives, donations to the local children’s aid foundation. Private funeral. The park attendants all went anyway.

The next spring there were two new regulars in the park. Two young men who sat in peaceful silence all day, or strolled happily – hand in hand – from bench to bench.


End file.
